Yesterday was the “Great Glebe Garage Sale” – a community garage sale in one of the nicer residential parts of downtown Ottawa. Having had success at previous Glebe sales (I scored a copy of Cyborg Commando for $3 two years ago), I loaded up with my backpack and hit the neighborhood at 7 am to see what I could find.

$20 later, I’m home with two Top Secret / S.I. boxes in my backpack. Two very heavy Top Secret / S.I. boxes. Heavy because they are full of books, far more than just the core game and the High Stakes expansion (basically the Monte Carlo & Vehicle expansion for the game).

Box 1 – the Top Secret / S.I. box

• Top Secret / S.I. core books (player & administrator books ; equipment & adventure booklets)
• Dungeons & Dragons Mentzer 1983 Basic Rules (player & DM books)
• Palladium’s “Compendium of Weapons, Armour & Castles”
• All the vehicle “cards” for the High Stakes boxed set (like the GDW 2nd edition of Twilight 2000, this game came with a pile of material printed on lightweight card – in this case, a bunch of stat sheets for cars, boats, planes and bikes and so on, over a half-inch thick of them)
• A folder with a hand-stenciled “TOP SECRET” logo containing seven Top Secret / S.I. characters and two Villains & Vigilantes characters.
• Blueprint style map from the TS/SI game
• Monaco Map from the High Stakes box
• Bunch of blank character folders

Box 2 – the Top Secret / S.I. High Stakes box

• Top Secret / S.I. – Guns, Gadgets & Getaway Vehicles supplement
• Top Secret / S.I. – High Stakes books (3 booklets – Monte Carlo, Grand Prix & Adventures)
• Top Secret / S.I. – Freelancers book (basically a near-future superspy supplement for TS/SI)
• Top Secret / S.I. – Administrator’s Screen
• 1 AD&D2e character (level 7 human fighter)
• 1 AD&D1e character (level 1 human cleric)
• 1 Plastic Cow
• 1 “limousine” graph paper booklet (roughly 5″ by 8″ booklet full of five-rule graph paper)

and then the pay dirt… I hadn’t dug through the boxes completely when I bought them, so I only noticed these when I got home.

• Top Secret Companion (expansion rules for the original Top Secret game, not /S.I.)
• Operation Sprechenhaltestelle (first adventure for the original Top Secret game)
• Top Secret Administrator’s Screen

and the piece de resistance…

• Top Secret RPG, Second Printing

I’m a Top Secret junkie. What pains me is that while I learned the game with the second printing, the copy I owned until now was the first printing which has inferior layout and still uses Wrestling Rating instead of subsuming it into the HTH rating. So I finally got (one of) my Holy Grail(s) – the second printing of the first edition Top Secret RPG. I am geeked right the heck out.